Summary

Set in a remote village in the north of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two teenage boys meet and transform each other's lives.

James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village's leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his reach: autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man—Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him "like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre," drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke's bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.

Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.

Beyond the Book:
Classics of Queer Irish Literature

Ireland has an undeniably rich literary history across a wide range of fiction, drama, and poetry—this abundant legacy includes a number of noteworthy pieces of queer fiction and memoir. One of the latest entries into this catalog is poet Seán Hewitt's debut novel Open, Heaven, a gay coming-of-age story that centers on the relationship between two teenage boys.

When discussing queer Irish literature, a natural enough place to start is with Oscar Wilde, who published a number of works in the late nineteenth century. In his only complete novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the titular character sells his soul in order to retain eternal youth and beauty—his portrait, meanwhile, ages and reflects Gray's sins as he lives a hedonistic life. While not explicitly queer, the novel's homoerotic undertones are undeniable. During the trial in which Wilde was ultimately convicted for homosexual acts, Dorian Gray was referred to by opposing council as a "sodomitical book"

In the twentieth century, Kate O'Brien was a prominent Irish playwright and the author of nine novels. O'Brien, who was herself a lesbian, included a handful of queer characters in her works. Though hardly explicit, two of them—Mary Lavelle (1936) and The Land of Spices (1941)—were banned in Ireland by the Censorship of Publications Board for homosexual content. A number of her novels have since been brought back into print by Virago.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Jamie O'Neill published At Swim, Two Boys (2001), its title a reference to the Flannery O'Connor novel At Swim, Two Birds. O'Neill's novel is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that evokes James Joyce and is set during the 1916 Easter Rising. Two boys, Jim and Doyler—one quiet and reserved, one loud and outspoken—meet in school and strike up a friendship that blossoms into more. At Swim, Two Boys received a Lambda Literary Award and is widely regarded as a modern classic of queer fiction.

One of Ireland's most prolific contemporary gay writers is Colm Tóibín, best known for his novel Brooklyn (2009), which won the Costa Novel Award and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Many of Tóibín's works feature queer narratives, most notably The Story of the Night (1996), a coming-of-age novel about a gay Argentinian man growing up in the 1970s. Though Tóibín's third novel, it was his first to feature a gay protagonist. Tóibín has also published queer nonfiction, like his essay collection A Guest at the Feast (2022), in which he discusses growing up gay in Ireland and his relationship to the Catholic Church.

Another notable work of queer Irish nonfiction is All Down Darkness Wide (2022), a memoir by the author of Open, Heaven. In All Down Darkness Wide, Hewitt discusses his own experiences as a gay Irish man, particularly focusing on his relationship with Elias, a young man struggling with severe mental illness.

The contemporary Irish literature scene boasts many additional queer authors and novels. Emma Donoghue, John Boyne, Karen Fagan, and Sebastian Barry are just a few of the prominent writers whose works tend to feature queer themes.

Summary

Most people don't even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it's just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise, and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier, telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into eighteen-year-old Louisa's care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. The closer she gets to the painting's birthplace, the more nervous she becomes about what she'll find. Louisa is proof that happy endings don't always take the form we expect in this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art.

Beyond the Book:
Mary Oliver and "The Summer Day"

Fredrik Backman's new novel, My Friends, repeatedly quotes "The Summer Day," a well-known poem by poet Mary Oliver (1936-2019).

Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio, a small, rural town less than 20 miles southeast of Cleveland. Her upbringing was "chaotic" and she experienced sexual abuse at a young age, eventually finding solace in nature and spending her free time exploring the forests and wetlands near her home. "I got saved by the beauty of the world," as she put it in a 2015 interview.

By age 13, Oliver knew she wanted to be a writer, and by age 14 she had started writing poetry. In 1950, she visited Steepletop in Austerlitz, New York, the home of the poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay, which had a profound impact on her. She connected with Millay's sister, Norma, who was organizing her recently deceased sibling's papers, and Oliver became a permanent resident there after her high school graduation. Her exposure to Millay's work during the period heavily influenced her own poetry.

While at Steepletop, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become her long-term partner. The two were instantly attracted to each other; Cook became Oliver's literary agent, and helped her publish her first collection of poetry, No Voyage, and Other Poems, in 1963. The pair moved to Cape Cod later that year, where they remained together until Cook's death in 2005.

Oliver was a prolific writer and has more than 30 collections of prose and poetry to her name. American Primitive, her fifth book, won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and in 1992 her New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award. Her works are largely about her experiences in nature, encouraging her readers to observe and celebrate the beauty around them.

Arguably her most famous poem is "The Summer Day," first published in her 1990 collection House of Light, which won both the Christopher Award and the LL Winship/PEN New England Award:

"Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"

In My Friends, an artist often shares these last lines with those around him. Of course, Backman is far from being the only person to quote the lines; their use is ubiquitous, appearing on mugs and t-shirts, as tattoos, taped to bathroom mirrors—anywhere and as anything people look to for inspiration.

You can listen to Oliver read the poem at The Kid Should See This.

Summary

Two out of three soldiers who perished in the Civil War died of infected wounds, typhoid, and other infectious diseases. But no doctor truly understood what was happening to their patients. Twenty years later, the outcome might have been different following one of the most radical intellectual transformations in the history of the world: germ theory, the recognition that the tiniest forms of life have been humankind's greatest killers. It was a discovery centuries in the making that transformed modern life and public health.

This revolution has a pre-history. In the late-sixteenth century, scientists and hobbyists used the first microscopes to confirm the existence of living things invisible to the human eye. So why did it take two centuries to make the connection between microbes and disease? As Thomas Levenson reveals in this globe-trotting history, the answer has everything to do with how we see ourselves. For centuries, people in the west, believing themselves to hold God-given dominion over nature, thought too much of humanity and too little of microbes to believe they could take us down. When scientists finally made the connection by the end of the 19th-century, life-saving methods to control infections and contain outbreaks soon followed. The next big break came with the birth of the antibiotic era in the 1930s. And yet, less than a century later, the promise of the antibiotic revolution is already receding from years of overuse. Why?

In So Very Small, Thomas Levenson follows the thread of human ingenuity and hubris across centuries—along the way peering into microscopes, spelunking down sewers, traipsing across the battlefield, and more—to show how we came to understand the microbial environment and how little we understand ourselves. He traces how and why ideas are pursued, accepted, or ignored—and hence how human habits of mind can, so often, make it terribly hard to ask the right questions.

Beyond the Book:
Plague in the 21st Century

Thomas Levenson begins So Very Small, his history of the development of germ theory, with an account of the Great Plague that struck London in 1665. Although this was the last major outbreak to hit England, Yersinia pestis, the bacterium which causes bubonic and pneumonic plague, has survived—and indeed thrived—well into the 21^st century. As recently as 2010, the National Institutes of Health claimed that, thanks to a proliferation of trade routes across the globe, the "plague is more widespread today than it has ever been."



Thankfully, these days plague bacteria mostly limit themselves to the world's rodent population. As Levenson describes, modern sanitation and hygiene practices have ensured that the majority of humans no longer share so much of their personal space with rats—or, more importantly, the fleas which thrive in their fur and can transmit the disease to humans. But that doesn't stop new human cases of plague emerging even today. It might seem extraordinary, but the United States sees an average of seven plague cases every year, and the World Health Organization estimates the annual global figure to be in the thousands. That's a far cry from the tens of millions who died within less than a decade during the Black Death, but the disease can still be deadly. Pneumonic plague can kill within 24 hours and remains fatal in 100 percent of cases when left untreated.

In 2014, for example, plague broke out on the island of Madagascar. Although the spread of the disease was limited—with only 263 cases reported to the WHO—the average fatality rate was still over 25 percent, meaning one in every four people who caught it died. (This rate could be as high as 60 percent depending on how late the patient received treatment.) Similar outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the plague is endemic to certain regions, saw lethality reaching over 30 percent.

As Levenson outlines, the development of germ theory heralded the arrival of modern antibiotics, which can be extremely effective against ancient scourges like the plague. The result is that Yersinia pestis (in its current strain) is unlikely to cause the widespread devastation it once did. But antibiotics can only work in places where they're being administered, and cases can only be detected in facilities with the medical equipment to do so. It's little wonder then that, given what we know about the way the plague spreads, you're more likely to die from it in certain parts of Africa than anywhere else on the globe. What was once the great leveler—culling rich and poor alike—is now a disease of poverty, by its very definition proliferating among the kind of deprivation where its hosts—infected rats and fleas—thrive the best.

As the NIH admits, the plague "cannot be eradicated." Levenson celebrates the fact that scientific progress over generations means we can live more safely even alongside deadly microorganisms—but he also reminds us that progress never spreads itself equally. The story of So Very Small is that humanity has fashioned the tools to mitigate the worst effects of diseases like the plague; the story of plague in the 21^st century is that the poorest on our planet also need access to those tools that so many of us take for granted.

Reported Plague Cases by Country, 2013–2018 courtesy of Centers for Disease Control